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Boiled Over
by Matthew Deane

An effective way to stir up great anger in any mother is to try making gunpowder in her kitchen, using her stove, her stock pot, and your own urine as the key ingredient. This may sound like a predicament easily avoided, but for my best friend Mark and me, the thought of blowing things up using gunpowder created from our own piss was a seductive challenge and we didn’t have the skills to resist.

We had used up our brand-name gunpowder making toilet-paper-tube bombs. Had anyone ventured into the woods behind Mark’s house, they would have found enough charred evidence to convict us many times over. We soon regretted creating smoldering craters and sending various household items flying about the forest with many a satisfying boom, however, because Mark had just come into possession of something most boys could only dream about.

The little cannon was fourteen inches long and three inches thick. We had yards of fuse and pounds of lead shot, but were in need of gunpowder. Were we able to find a store that sold gunpowder, we knew from experience that they would not sell large quantities of it to two fifteen year old boys. It was up to us to make our own. We had made smoke bombs, stink bombs, firecrackers, and napalm, why not gunpowder? We had read about making gunpowder from urine, but had no clear idea what it entailed, other than the addition of sulfur and charcoal. We decided to boil some urine on the stove and see what happened.

Once Mark’s mom left the house, we each drank three glasses of water. I was expected to be the largest producer, since I had always been the more frequent visitor to the smallest room.

“So…do you have to go?” It had been all of thirty seconds and Mark was already expecting a fountain to spray forth from my loins.

“Dude, I just finished drinking enough water to choke a camel, give my body a few minutes to filter it out and make some pee!” I rubbed my full belly and eased into a chair like an incontinent old man. “What are we going to pee into anyway? We can’t scoop it out of the toilet; it would be mostly water if we did, plus the fact that it would be gross.” I didn’t realize that of the items on our agenda that morning, scooping watery piss out of the toilet was lowest on the sliding scale of grossness.

Mark dug around in a cupboard and pulled out a stock pot missing one of its handles. “We’ll use this, my mom won’t mind, it’s old and she is always saying she wants new pots and pans.” He set it on the stove and dropped into a chair across the table from me. After a few minutes of staring at each other impatiently, I suggested that we go swimming, in hopes that the water would provide a subconscious urge to pee.

It did. Within minutes I found myself in a race against bladder control. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the stockpot off the stove. I thought to run into the bathroom down the hall, but in a flush of panic, I dropped the pot onto the floor and groped at the drawstring of my swim trunks. The knot undone, I pulled down the waistband to expose my equipment and let go with a hearty stream into the pot.

“Dude! Use the bathroom, what if my mom came home right now?” Mark who had just arrived on the scene, shouted at me with a laugh.

I envisioned Mark’s mom (upon whom I had a bit of a crush), walking into her kitchen to find me standing there, dripping wet with member in hand, and what that might lead to began to play out in my dirty teenage mind. My fantasy did not progress too far, as the cool air blowing from a nearby vent, coupled with the goose bumps coating my skin soon reminded me of the temporary effects that swimming and the cold have on a boy’s loins. The fear that Mark’s mom might make a sudden appearance now horrified me. I halted my work in mid-stream, stowed my gear, grabbed the stock pot, and ran to the bathroom to finish behind a locked door.

I soon returned to the kitchen, and handed my results over to Mark.

“Is that all you’ve got? He asked, as if I had somehow forgotten a few pints.

“It’s more than you’ve got,” I replied. “When you make a bigger contribution than that, you can complain to me about mine.”

“I don’t have to go yet, but when I do I’ll definitely have more than you,” he said, ever the competitor. “In the meantime, let’s get started before my mom comes home.”

He put the pot on one of the big burners and turned it on high. We stood and watched without a word as the electric coil snapped and crackled with heat. Within a couple of minutes, the first hints of steam began to rise from the depths of the pot, which was for us a signal to stick our noses over it and take a whiff.

“Whew! That’s nasty; can you imagine boiling a huge cauldron of piss over a fire? I bet the guys that made gunpowder in the olden days were really rich, because no one else wanted to work with the smell.” My nose curled in disgust.

“No, I bet they made their prisoners of war or slaves do it. Some probably passed out from the smell and fell into the boiling pot of piss and died a horrible stinky death!” Mark countered with a laugh.

“I can barely breathe in here, I ‘m going swimming.” I made for the door, and Mark followed.

“I’ll just close the screen so the smell can escape. We’ll come back and check it in a few minutes.” Mark said as he slid the sliding glass door open.

A few minutes turned into thirty. We didn’t see the car pull into the driveway, but we did hear the scream that followed.

“Boys! Get in here, NOW!”

“Oh crap! We forgot the piss!” Mark climbed out of the pool and ran to the house. I followed, hoping that if his mom was swinging a broomstick, it would take Mark down first, giving me time to run the other way.

She was enraged. My piss had boiled away, leaving something behind to burn in the overheated stock pot. The pungent stench of burnt pee violated our nasal passages.

“What on earth happened in here?” his mother asked, eyes brimming with moisture in reaction to the foul air. She pushed the pot off the burner, switched off the heat, and would have glared at us had her eyes been able to focus.

“We went swimming and forgot that the stove was on.” I offered meekly.

Mark broke the silence that followed my lame and insufficient confession. “Mom, we’re sorry, we were trying to make gunpowder from Matt’s pee. We used up all of ours last week and we needed some to shoot my new cannon. We’ll clean up the mess and we promise we’ll never do it again.” Mark said all of this without so much as a shameful bow of the head, a great show of tears, or even a hint of remorse; his tone was so matter-of-fact, as if it were not at all weird, dangerous, or insane. I stood there and waited for his mother’s head to explode, the devil to climb up through a hole in the floor and drag us both speedily down to hell, or something equally catastrophic to occur that would physically and emotionally scar me for life.

Instead, she smiled. “You guys are going to get hurt one day. I hope you are being careful - can you promise me that much? I don’t ever want to have to explain to Matt’s parents why his head is on the roof, his guts are spilled all over the yard, and his legs are in the pool. Now clean this up, and please stay out of my kitchen except to eat, capice?” She took her purse from the table, then turned and left the house through the front door. We heard her start the car and drive away as we opened the cabinet under the sink to search for cans of air freshener.

Mark and I aired out the house using fans placed throughout the halls and in windows. I wanted to ask him if he thought his mom would tell my parents, but never mustered the courage. In a couple of hours the air was clean and breathable again, and my answer came in through the open front door. Mark’s mother had returned, and she carried a great big box in her hands.

“Boys, come help me put away my new pots and pans.”

Matthew Deane is a rejected (but not dejected) writer from New Hampshire. He is rather new to the submissions and rejections process, having only started down the long-suffering road of the writer in 2007, when he joined a local writer’s group at the behest of his wife. Since then he has been rejected by several agents, publications, and contests, but oddly enough, never by a reader. His creative non-fiction stories have been dredged from the depths of his own memory, and his writing casts a humorous light on the physical, mental, and emotional rigors of growing up. Some of his work can be found here, and you may contact him here.